It has been shown that during exposure to microgravity in parabolic flights the control of interaction forces adaptspartially to the lack of gravity, yet evidence indicates that anticipation of gravity's effects persists in the short term.The motivation for these experiments to be performed in long‐duration space flight is to understand how the centralnervous system adapts to an environment without gravity and what will be the consequences of long‐term adaptationwhen an individual returns to a normal (Earth) or partial (Moon or Mars) gravitational field. The DexterousManipulation (DEX) experiment will target specific questions about the effects of gravity on dexterous manipulation.The subject will perform a variety of movements while holding an instrumented manipulandum in a precision gripbetween the thumb and index finger. Thereby the forces acting between the hand and the manipulandum aremeasured. The overall experiment set-up, which has been prototyped during several ESA parabolic flights, will allowto measure grip force and load force between fingers and manipulandum, as well as manipulandum acceleration,rotational velocity and 3D position. The DEX instrument is being developed under ESA contract in view of a launchon ISS in the 2014 timeframe. This paper presents the experiment background, the experiment set-up, a designdescription, and more information on the DEX program.
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